Poor Doug Mientkiewicz. At long last, his agony has ended . . . except, of course, that he's still a Kansas City Royal.

Mientkiewicz? He's the twit who was then playing first base for the Boston Red Sox in the fourth game of the 2004 World Series and caught Keith Foulke's short toss following an Edgar Renteria comebacker to end that competition and give the Sox a sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals and their first championship since God was a little boy.

Happy times, right? Well, mostly. Except that Mientkiewicz chose to keep the ball, claiming it was his, and his alone. How he reached that conclusion will forever remain a mystery . . . but reach it, he did. And pretty much from that moment until this week -- a stretch of 18 months of coarseness and audacity and, basically, thievery -- Mientkiewicz and the Red Sox have been wrangling over proper ownership of the ball.

Well, you've read the news. All parties have agreed to allow the ball -- a happy symbol to so many of New England's millions of baseball fans -- to go on display in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. And thus, the incredibly stupid episode is over.

"Me, my family, went through hell and back," said Mientkiewicz, who'd crassly called the ball his children's inheritance. "It should have been handled differently."